Ep 140 Are You Waiting For Joy? Here's What You're Missing

We so often treat joy as a destination, something we'll get to once everything is sorted, healed, achieved or resolved. I'll be happy when. I'll relax when. I'll feel free when.

But what if joy was never meant to be a finish line? What if it's already here, quietly woven through the ordinary moments we're moving too fast to notice?

In this episode I share a moment from a recent Wonder Walk that caught me completely off guard, a card about an egg that gave me permission to stop interpreting everything, and a gentle invitation to notice the nourishment that's already in your life. 

No waiting required.

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📧 Email: carlykillenpt@gmail.com
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Thank you for being here, and I look forward to supporting you on your journey to strength, health, and confidence! 💪🦴✨

Transcript

0:03

Hello, and welcome back to Rooted in Presence Podcast. I'm Carly, your breathwork facilitator, strength coach, menopause coach, and founder of Still Space Hull. And of course, your guide for this episode, which is 140. So if you're new here, very warm welcome to you. I hope you find something in today's episode that really lands for you. So I would like to start today with something that came out of my mouth recently that made me laugh a little bit because it was probably one of the most honest things I've said in a while, and it actually surprised me. And I think it takes a lot to surprise yourself sometimes. But yeah, I was chatting with a actual person, so I said this out loud, that I'd quite like something good to happen that didn't require 10 years of hindsight before I understood why it was good for me. You know those moments when life sends you some difficulties, quite a few unexpected things, or perhaps even something painful, and you have those well-meaning people, and they genuinely are well-meaning, but they, they say things like, "One day you'll see why this happened. One day this will make sense. One day you'll look back on this and be grateful." And yeah, if I'm honest, they are right. Um, I don't disagree, but sometimes we do look back and find the gift tucked away inside the hard thing. I've experienced that plenty myself, more than once. And yeah, I believe it. It is not something to be completely dismissed. But recently I have caught myself thinking, "Can I just have something that's a bit more obviously lovely? Something that doesn't need interpretation or doesn't need to become meaningful later. Maybe something that just gets to feel good now, in the moment, as it's happening, without me having to excavate it for lessons afterwards." And well, the funny thing is, when I sat with that thought for a while, I realized that life has actually already been offering me these things. I'd just been walking straight past them at times because they weren't arriving in forms that I expected, and they weren't big, massive breakthroughs. They weren't huge achievements. So they weren't big moments at all There weren't big moments of clarity or success or any major feeling of arrival. There were just these small moments of nourishment, and a conversation that made me feel seen. A cup of tea that was exactly the right temperature. Walks where I noticed something I'd never noticed before. Little moments of laughter that happened completely unexpectedly in some interesting places. And the kind of things that are really easy to dismiss as ordinary, you can easily dismiss them as nothing much, perhaps even thinking maybe they don't count. But often these things are... But yet, so often these are the things that carry us through when we can sometimes otherwise feel like we're walking through treacle. So I'd like to tell you something that's happened recently that brought all of this into a very sharp focus for me. Now, some of you will know about the Wonder Walks I run. For those of you who are new, they're exactly what they sound like. Slow, intentional walks where the whole point is not to get anywhere or achieve anything or find anything in particular, but just simply to notice, to slow down enough to meet what's already there. I've just started running them. I did the first one just a few days ago, and it's all part of the work I do at Still Space Hull. But they grew out of a recognition that many of us move through worlds at a pace that makes it almost impossible to see what's right in front of us. So when I hosted the first one the other day, And actually, I would like to share something a little bit honest, about where I was going into it, because, well, that's important too. So life had been very lifey in the days leading up to the first Wonder Walk, very full, a lot of complexity, a lot, a lot going on. The kind of week where by the end of it, I was very aware I was running on something that really isn't quite my usual level of energy. I felt a bit like I was running on fumes, to be honest, and the details aren't needed to be shared right here. Of course, that's for me to carry privately. But what I will say is that I showed up to lead that walk carrying more than what I would usually bring with me, but I didn't wanna cancel. It didn't feel right to cancel. I was looking forward to it so much, and it took a bit of courage for me to put this out there, but I was also aware that I wasn't gonna be able to perform. Not that I particularly perform in my work day to day, but there definitely have been times in the past where I absolutely papered over a lot of cracks. But I wasn't gonna be able to show up polished even if I wanted to. I wasn't even quite fully resourced as I usually would be to facilitate So I was feeling a bit wobbly, but I just showed up as I was. I was still able to hold the container. I set that intention. I was able to lead the pace of the walk. But yeah, I had no performance about me. I wasn't able to perform a version of myself that I thought people would want to see. But I also wasn't minimizing what I was carrying. I also didn't want to make myself the center of the day. I didn't want to cause any drama. I was able to just be present, really present, and that felt really truthful. And from comments I've received before and since, that way of being can be a lot easier to be around than a polished performance version of somebody. And then something happened that I genuinely didn't expect. The group led me in a way, or we led each other. Someone gently pointed out, "Oh, have you seen this over here?" And they showed us something that I didn't even know was there, even on my own wonder walks I do myself. It was a detail I'd walked past before without even registering, and there was just this moment of, wow, that's, that's been there the whole time, and even I didn't slow down enough to see that. And that moment really caught me off guard in a very nice way because I'd showed up thinking my role was to lead. And what I found instead was when I showed up without performance, just as I was, there was space for everyone, including me, to discover something together. And I found a great joy in that. And I talk about joy a lot with my clients, but I think that's what it actually looks and feels like when it's real, you know, not some kind of destination to arrive at or a reward for having done everything right. It's just a moment of genuine aliveness that happens when we stop trying to manage the experience and just allow ourselves to be in it And I've also had a, another reminder recently. Sometimes these things just all fall together, don't they? I don't know if you've had that experience. Feel free to share if you have something similar, that's real for you too. But recently I've also been reminded of something around this time. I had a card pulled for me, an oracle card not so long ago, or maybe it's longer ago than I think. And I can't remember the exact wording now, but the essence of it was something about finding an egg. And there was this beautiful reflection about how we often look at something like an egg and immediately want it to be more, maybe a symbol of rebirth, a sign of new beginnings, a promise of what's coming next. We can ascribe so many metaphors to the egg, and rightly so. It's a fair point. You know, we look for messages and perhaps try to find a lesson that we need to be learning. And maybe it is all of those things. I love symbolism. I love a metaphor, but maybe it's also just breakfast. And I really love that so much because I think it gives us permission to just receive things as they are without needing to turn them into something. Not everything has to become a lesson, and not everything has to earn its place by being meaningful. Sometimes the thing in front of us is simply something that sustains life, and we're allowed to receive it just like that. We're allowed to enjoy the cup of tea without it being a mindfulness practice. We're allowed to laugh at something ridiculous without it being a lesson in lightening up. We're allowed to notice a flower without needing to symbolize our personal growth journey. Sometimes it is just a flower, and I think sometimes that just gets to be enough So again, from the work I do and the people I speak to, and my own reflections, I, I believe that perhaps for many of us, as well as including myself in this, we can spend huge amounts of our lives treating joy as something we're working towards, something we'll access once the conditions are right. Maybe I'll relax when the business is more stable, or I'll enjoy myself when I've sorted my health. I'll feel free when I've dealt with that sticky situation that's going on. Or maybe I'll finally be happy when things are calmer, clearer, and more certain. Do you recognize any of those things? And I'm sure perhaps you can create some of your own. But after the weight loss, after the promotion, after the move, the healing, after the next thing and the thing after that. And the problem with treating joy as a destination is that it's always just ahead of where you are. Every time you get close, there's another condition that needs to be met before you're allowed to actually feel it. I don't think joy works like that. I think joy is something we notice along the way, and the noticing requires us to be present enough to catch it when it arrives, which in my experience is usually a much smaller and quieter, more ordinary moment than we might be expecting. And that doesn't mean pretending everything is fine when it isn't. It definitely doesn't mean bypassing grief or difficulty or the very real hard things that happen in life. I've talked about grief in the previous episode, and I mean it when I say it deserves to be honored, not skipped over. But I think both things can be true. Life absolutely can be difficult and full and uncertain and a lot. And alongside all of that, there can still be moments of genuine goodness available to us. Not as the quick fix, not a way to make the hard things feel less hard. Just something to sustain us along the way, to remind us that we're alive and to give us something to carry forward So let's talk a little more about showing up without performing. I'd like to come back to something from the Wonder Walk because I think there might be something in it for all of us to have a think about. But when I showed up that day without performing, and I was tempted to, I was tempted to put on a bigger smile than what I was really feeling. But when I show up without managing how I came across or curating a version of myself I thought I needed people to see, something shifted in the group. People were more themselves, more willing to point things out, to slow down, to share what they were noticing. There was a more genuine connection than there might have been if I'd arrived perfectly polished and super sorted. And I think there's something in that when it comes to joy too. When we're in performance mode, when we're managing our experience and trying to appear as though we're doing life correctly or properly, we're not actually available to receive what's really being offered. Maybe we're too busy pretending to be present. So dropping the performance, even just a little, even just for a walk or a quiet cup of tea on your own, it does actually create space for something real to land, and I believe that real is where the nourishment is. So I want to leave you with a gentle invitation today rather than a set of questions to work through, and it's just this. What if you didn't need to wait until everything was sorted? What if there was something nourishing already present in your life right now, something small, ordinary, something easy to walk straight past if you weren't paying attention? Maybe it's a conversation, a tree, a meal, a friend, a moment of laughter, something someone showed you that you didn't know was there. And it doesn't need to be a reward, a lesson. Doesn't need to be a grand metaphor, just nourishment along the way. And if slowing down enough to notice that feels like something you'd like a little more of, that's exactly what the Wonder Walks are for. I do them monthly. They are free, and they start from Trinity Square in Hull. And we move slowly, we pay attention, we let life meet us rather than chasing it. So if you'd like more details of the walks... head over to stillspacehull.com or I will put a link to the WhatsApp group if you are local and would like to join, and you can join from there. So thank you so much for being here today, whether you're a longtime listener or this is your very first episode, I'm so glad you found your way to this space. And if today's episode has stirred something or if you'd like to explore what it might feel like to slow down and reconnect with yourself, your body, with the small good things that are already around you, that's what Still Space Hull is here for. Breathwork, coaching, and community online and in person in Hull. So you can come and find me in stillspacehull.com. All the details will be in the show notes. So until next time, may you meet yourself with compassion, walk with presence, and remember you already have everything you need